Ridley Scott’s The Martian just had a massive $55 million opening weekend. Matt Damon stars as Mark Watney, a stranded astronaut whose limited supplies are made up for by an abundance of wit and…
It’s primary season in America, that special time when we come together as a nation and renew the democratic process by relentlessly quantifying popular opinion. According to the polls, for example…
A few months ago, one of us (okay, Andrew), referred to the esteemed physicist and public intellectual Lawrence Krauss as “a windbag.” One of us (Michael) can attest that Andrew is among the kindest…
You could read this as a straightforward narrative of medical recovery. Or you could read it as a fraught parable of modern identity: Doctors diagnose a two-year-old boy, Alex, with autism. Like other…
The Pew Research Center has pubished a new report on cellphone etiquette. If you’ve ever wondered whether your fellow Americans are judging you for talking on your phone in public, or checking…
New York Times science columnist George Johnson had the epistemological grumps last week, about what he titled “The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths.” It once seemed inevitable that science would…
The following essay contains some minor spoilers. – eds. Imagine a world where robots look, act, and function like human beings, minus consciousness or free will. They’ve been programmed to take over…
Rob Bell is on the move. In 1998, as a 28-year-old evangelical pastor in Michigan, Bell founded Mars Hill Church. The community swelled into a megachurch, and Bell gained a national reputation among…
